Florida Dairy Farmers

Challenge

Florida doesn’t normally conjure up images of rolling farms but rather beaches and thriving nightlife. However, for the 130 dairy families throughout the state of Florida, the Sunshine State remains their favorite farmland. The Florida Dairy Farmers association needed a fresh way to breathe new life into a brand plagued by declining dairy sales and misunderstandings and assumptions about the area. Florida Dairy wanted a new web experience that would be emblematic of the unique business of dairy in an unexpected state like Florida. They also needed to ensure that website visitors of all ages and backgrounds could experience the website and easily access the information they sought out. The Florida Dairy Farmer group also wanted to prioritize user experience and UX-centered design. The old site had limited functionality and the organization experienced firsthand the vulnerability that comes with an open-source platform.

Solution

Florida Dairy needed a web experience partner that equipped its team with all of the digital tools to reimagine the way people thought about dairy farming and the role dairy should play in the average diet. To meet these challenges, Florida Dairy turned to Solodev to bring a comprehensive approach from design to development.

Solodev and its in-house design agency DigitalUs needed to give Florida Dairy a web design facelift to both improve user experience (UX) and give a more inviting look to the website. They partnered with Florida Dairy to configure a UX design that streamlined navigation while giving visitors quick access to the features they’d come to love in the older website. One of the biggest features Florida Dairy needed to upgrade was its popular recipe site. Solodev constructed a custom recipe module to streamline adding and updating recipes whenever needed. Other modules included the contests module where visitors can safely and securely submit their information for the chance to win prizes and engage with the Florida Dairy brand on a deeper level. Another module included the farm families module, which puts faces behind the Florida dairy farming community’s biggest names. Florida Dairy also leveraged the ease of use of the Solodev CMS particularly for its blog. Content creators can quickly add copy, images, and video elements in one location without ever needing to know a line of code.

The Solodev platform made it easy for Florida Dairy’s content, PR and Marketing teams to address news as it was breaking. Rather than stagnate behind days in IT waiting for someone to make the content changes, the Florida Dairy team can control user permissioning and allow people who need to change creative or content elements immediate access to do so. This gives them a quick response time to submit alerts or critical changes as well.

To optimize their hosting capabilities, Florida Dairy harnessed the power of the AWS Cloud by leveraging Solodev’s status as an Amazon Web Services Partner. This exposed Florida Dairy’s website to a breadth of opportunities available through cloud hosting. Solodev utilized AWS CloudFront, an extremely powerful CDN that drastically increased the delivery speed of Florida Dairys website. Additionally, Solodev utilized Amazon RDS to set up, operate,and scale relational databases (MySQL) for Florida Dairy in the cloud in conjunction with AWS CloudFront. The dairy organization also tapped into the AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to have the ability to quickly auto-scale capacity to serve instances of sudden heavy loads without worrying about a crash. Florida Dairy can rest easy in best-of-breed security provided by AWS services by the increased privacy and control network access with network firewalls built into Amazon.

Results

The Solodev CMS platform gives Florida Dairy an efficient way for non-technical staff to keep the website updated with the latest in dairy farming news. The resulting site effectively delivered messaging and continues to meet objectives -- both online and offline. Site administrators can quickly make adjustments to content and creative elements as needed and know exactly who is making those changes thanks to Solodev’s permissioning system. The new Solodev-powered site reduced bounce rate by almost 40 percent between the old site and the updated platform. At the same time, website visitors’ time per page more than doubled with the average time spent on site doubling as well.